A grim morning. Heavy tropical rain. What to do about accommodation for expedition members arriving towards the end of the week? The hotels here are ruinously expensive. The economy here centers on fleecing visitors to a quite extraordinary degree. Tom and Wolf are faced with the prospect of putting up six or so people for a week or more. This would knock an enormous hole in expedition funds, a bare bones package that has taken five years to find (the Lighthouse Foundation is funded by wealthy Hanseatic families: Elizabeth Mann -Borghese, Thomas Mann's daughter, was involved until her death towards the end of last year).
I cold call the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation, bluffing that I am a BBC radio journalist (true once - and still the case in so far as there is 'interest' at Radio 4 Natural History Unit and the World Service in audio material from Saya). They put me in touch with Mr Bernard Elizabeth at the Seychelles Petroleum Company. He's involved with the Boy Scouts Association. "Dis seems like a humanitarian situashan" says Mr Elizabeth. "I'm sure we can help you". They have a hall bang in the middle of Victoria's tiny downtown. It looks like this will save the expedition about two thousand US dollars.
Back at the Yacht club a shipment has come in. But it's the wrong one. This is number two. Shipment number one, the big one, contains all the absolute essentials for the expedition. Number two is the nice but not absolutely necessary stuff. There is no news of number one.
Wolf calls Roo, Pete Lucas's girlfriend, in England. She confirms what his almost unintelligible email didn't. Pete and his brother left on the Orphee from Dar Es Salaam on Sunday (24th). He seems to think it will take him ten days to get here. Rubbish, says Hartmut. The wind and current is with him. He'll be able to put up the spinnaker much of the time and get here in five or six days. This would put him in on the 2nd or so.
Checking my e mail later that day, I see with absolute dread an email from the editor of the book I should be writing instead of being here. I leave it to the very last minute to open. To my enormous surprise, she says that the chapter I submitted just before I left is not crap, but excellent (the book is to be popular guide to energy efficiency and 'green' energy). When can she expect the next one, she asks.
Wolf Hilbertz studied architecture in Berlin in the 1960s. The academic environment was deathly conservative, he says. His ideas - particularly for new materials - were unacceptable to the university authorities. "I had to do all their bullshit just get through ze exams".
But the Americans loved his work. Wolf was invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to talk about plastics in construction and never looked back. "Ze Americans were open to everything. Always ready to try zomzink new. I loved it". Wolf taught architecture in Michigan and Texas. Increasingly, he focused on Mineral Accretion Technology (MAT).
One promising application was to protect the deep sunk pipes needed for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). "This was during the great days of the Carter administration [1977 -1980]. Radical thinking - massive programmes for renewable energy. What we are doing today is in that spirit. But as soon as Reagan came in they closed down the whole thing down. Overnight. It vas like murder, really like murder!"
Wolf says MAT has potential was to save the foundations of places like old Havannah - a World Heritage Site that is being undermined by the sea. But the US vetoed World Bank funding for a project he proposed (courtesy Helms -Burton).
Wolf is 63, married four times and with five children. We talk about his memories as small child towards the end of World War Two. He and his mother were not far from Dresden during the terror bombing (he would have been about five). "The skies full of bombers of wave after wave of bombers. Unbelievable, the humming like millions and millions of giant bees".
In cellars at night under bombardment he remembers "all the children, women and old people crying and screaming and crying beyond control as the thuds got closer and closer. Pure animal terror". One memory fills his eyes with tears. "I saw through a window some teenage boys naked dancing a crazy dance and howling with pain. Their skin was blue and purple". The boys had picked up what appeared to be fountain pens, dropped by the US Air Force. When opened the pens sprayed phosphorous which burned through clothing and into the skin. Nothing would put it out.
Over supper I ask Tom, Wolf, Hartmut what kind of large animals may be found at Saya besides coral. Earlier, I'd been looking at a BBC report on destruction of corals in deep in cold waters around the UK. A single trawler destroys of hundreds square kilometers in a few days. Tom says that the Russians used to trawl at Saya until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others may have continued. "
The reef we saw in 1997 could easily have been destroyed in just one trawl", says Tom. Malaysian Fishing Authorities report declining catches throughout the Saya region (and indeed the entire Mascarene ridge) over recent years - likely a result of over -fishing and wholesale habitat degradation.
Coral reefs at Saya may be quite limited in extent, but there are very large areas of sea grass on the banks. This is a good habitat for giant conch and for seahorses, among others. Dugongs (sea cows - the old world's version of the manatee) like sea grass too, but we don't have any reports of them here. Green turtles are also big fans of sea grass.
There are numerous anecdotal reports of both sperm and blue whales around Saya (Blues are the largest animals that have ever lived. It's thought that 99% of the entire population was wiped out during the 20th century).
Whale biologists believe there could be important populations of blues, sperm and other cetaceans in the area, with their own peculiar localized songs, but this part of the Indian Ocean is very little studied. The edges of the banks where cold waters upwell with nutrients, will be a good place to look. These kind of conditions are found close to our destination.
Caspar Henderson
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